Category Archives: SHRM

Recruiting Blocking and Tackling!

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This week I was at CareerBuilder’s Empower Roadshow talking with a few hundred Talent Acquisition pros and leaders in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Great event, great group of pros that were super engaged.

I led a panel on tips and tricks for in-the-trenches TA pros and leaders and one of my panelist was Bryan Rice, TA leader from Stryker. The title of this post came from him, he was big on getting TA pros back to blocking and tackling!

What’s blocking and tackling in talent acquisition?

Here’s what I would call the building blocks of great recruiting (Bryan’s blocking and tackling):

1. Phone skills. Have your recruiters conquered their fear of being on the phone? When they need to reach someone is their first thought, “Oh, I should pick up the phone and just ask the person.” Versus, sending them an email.

2. Ability to sell the position they are recruiting for. Can your recruiters effectively talk to a candidate and get them excited about the position, the supervisor of the position, the direction of the company, all the opportunities you can provide them, etc.? Bryan believes today’s recruiters might struggle with this the most, over anything else, and yet, as TA leaders we do very little to ever develop this skill!

3. Building relationships with hiring managers. Do your recruiters meet face-to-face with their hiring managers when they are working a position for that manager? Not only the first time but every time! You don’t build a strong relationship and find out how to add value if you don’t put in quality time with hiring managers. Today’s recruiters are moving too fast, to understand this value, and how it ultimately saves them a ton of time and effort!

4. Building relationships with candidates, that goes beyond the initial screening interview. Can your recruiters share with the hiring manager the candidate’s ‘story’ for each candidate that is presented to the manager? My goal as a recruiter should be that a manager shouldn’t be able to ask me a question about a candidate that I can’t answer. That’s tough, but that’s my goal!

This all seems so basic, yet most recruiters are weakest in these skills.

Why?

I believe the industry struggles here because TA leaders don’t know how to train these skills, and we don’t have off-the-shelve training programs that really go deep on these skills. So, instead of training recruiters properly, we just give them more technology so they can do a bad job, faster.

The training for four things above is very much a hands-on, one-on-one training. Sitting face-to-face and going over and practicing what these conversations look and sound like, and correcting in the moment, and doing them again and again.

The phone skills are just down and dirty getting recruiters on the phone and seeing who will conquer their fear! My first three weeks as a recruiter in training was calling 100 candidates a day. I couldn’t leave until I made 100 outgoing calls, each day, for three weeks.

At the end of those three weeks, I didn’t know if I could recruit, but I knew I wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone and talk to someone!

Make sure you connect with Bryan, he’s one of the TA leaders in the industry that really gets it!

The True Cost of a Bad Hire

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If there is one constant in HR and Recruiting it is the fact that no one will ever agree on how much a bad hire costs an organization!  Never!  It doesn’t matter how much time you put into coming up with some algorithm, how much research to back up your numbers, it’s still going to be 90% subjective/soft numbers at best.

This is the main reason executives in our organizations think the majority of HR/Talent Pros in the world don’t get business!   We come to them with stuff like this:

“We need to reduce turnover because of Engineer who leaves us, costs the company $7,345,876.23!”

Then you go through a 73 slide PowerPoint deck showing how you came up with the calculations all the way down the parking meter expense during the interview, and when you’re done, no one believes you’re even close to an actual number.

The gang over at National Business Research Institute put together a pretty good infographic proving my point – take a look:

NBRI - The Cost of a Bad Hire Infographic

97%+ of the ‘lost’ cost is from “Training” and “Productivity Loss” and those, my friends, are considered very subjective measures in almost all organizations.  What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’.  And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here.  Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

What that says is, ‘Oh, Jimmy isn’t working out – fire him – and because he wasn’t working out we lost ‘X’ percent of productivity over any other possible replacement (which in itself is a whole other leap)’.  And, we lost 100% of training we put into Jimmy because he is now not here.  Which again is subjective, since most training isn’t one-on-one, and resources used to train are almost always not used just on one person, etc.

So, here’s a better way to figure out the cost of a bad hire:

1. Ask your head of finance or accounting what they think it costs? “Ballpark it for me?”  $10K? Sounds great! We’ll use $10K.

2. Use $10K as your cost of bad hires.

Your reality, HR’s Reality, is it really doesn’t matter what the number is.  Only that the powers that be in your organization all agree on the number. Stop wasting your time trying to come up with a better number, just come up with a number that those signing the check agree is probably legit.

Pokemon Go Your Employees To Better Health

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I hate posts that just comment on the hottest thing going on in the world. Here’s the thing, I’m the last guy you want to hear some commentary on Black Lives Matter! So, you get Pokemon Go commentary instead!

Okay, here’s my take on Black Lives Matter –

  • If you say “All Lives Matter” you’re an ignorant asshole.
  • Of course “all” lives matter, but “all” lives are not getting killed for basic traffic violations.
  • I drove my car today. I was even speeding. At no point was I concerned a cop was going to pull me over and kill me for speeding, or anything else! I’m a middle-class white dude. That, by itself, is like a get out of jail free card for life!
  • Black Lives Matter because right now we need Black Lives to Matter. Let’s hope at some point we can add the Black Lives to the All Lives, but right now we can’t yet.
  • If you say Blue Lives matter, I get it. My brother is a cop. Cops get paid for shit. Have awful training, and are asked to make split second decisions in tense moments. They put their life on the line to protect civilians every day. Mistakes in that environment will be made, often. That’s a problem. When shots are fired, I hope and pray a cop will be there to protect me. Just like many were in Dallas.

Okay, now onto Pokemon Go!

  • My 13 year old walked around in our neighborhood more in the past 4 days then he did in the past 4 years!
  • Pokemon Go is f’ing brilliant. It’s the best thing to happen to wellness since, well, anything!
  • You should support your unhealthy employees need to want to go and find Pokemon! It will be the most successful thing you’ll ever do in employee wellness.
  • Also, on a side Recruiting note, did you realize there are nerd-herds out trying to catch Pokemon! Talk about great pools of IT talent just wondering around your city! Get on this! Pokemon Go is the best thing to happen to IT recruiting since Snap Chat! (he said completely laughing to himself knowing someone will truly believe this!)

Honestly, I love Pokemon Go. I saw so many teens out in my city walking and riding bikes the past few days!  Interacting together, while completely looking down at their phones.

It reminded me of when I was a kid and my parents would lock me out of the house until the street lights came on. Well, almost.

I even say white kids and black kids walking together, almost hand in hand, trying to find Pikachu! Dr. King would have had a tear in his eye, that a Japanese multi-national company developed a smartphone app that would finally bring us together under a common cause!

 

How To Build a Dream Team at Work

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If you pulled up any sports-related website or watched any sports news show on TV in the past few days you know that NBA player Kevin Durant left Oklahoma City Thunder and accepted a free agent offer to go and play for the Golden State Warriors.

It’s a big deal because Golden State was already pretty good, now, with Kevin, they look to be unstoppable! Basically, Golden State has built a team with arguably 4 of the top 20 players in the NBA on one team (Durant, Curry, Thompson, and Green). Most ‘great’ teams might have three top players, no one in history has had four when all playing at their peak!

Building a dream team seems to only happen in sports, but you hear talent acquisition leaders and executives talk about it a lot. How do we build a sales dream team, a marketing dream team, a design dream team, etc.? We all want to be a part of a dream team, or be a part of building a dream team for our organization!

So, how do you build a dream team?

1. You have to know how you want to ‘play’. You have to define what it is you want to do. An outcome. A style. “We want the best designed UX of any platform that supports patient safety in a hospital environment.” As an example.

2. You have to know who is the top talent in your industry that can accomplish the outcome you desire.  This is actually the hardest part of building a dream team in a non-sports environment because we usually don’t have comparing statistics or analytics to even start to understand who the best is.

3. You have to be able to recruit those individuals to your team. This is actually easier than in professional sports. In pro sports it usually takes one or two superstars to make a decision to get together, then they help recruit the others. In the real world, it helps to have a well-known professional, but it’s not necessary if you can sell the right story, compensation, and location!

4. Just having the ‘best players’ doesn’t guarantee success, they have to buy into the goal of the entire organization. This means having leadership with a clear vision that goes beyond the outcome. Yes, we want to win a championship, but we want to win that championship together, utilizing all of our strengths. This is another really tough thing in a real-world setting because it takes great visionary leadership.

5. Having a ‘Dream Team’ is about “Team”. You’ll have great talent and that great talent needs to understand that they go nowhere without those who support them to do great work. So, your dream team members have to be servant leaders. If they have great talent and treat people like crap, they won’t end up being a great talent!

I love it when great talent makes the conscious decision to get together and try and do something great. Some people don’t. They would prefer to see one great talent try and do it on their own. I love watching highly talented people get together and see how far they can push the levels of greatness! That’s what dream teams are all about, the dream.

2016’s Newest Benefit – Baby Sign-on Bonuses!

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According to this USA Today article, the U.S. birthrate is in sharp decline and is at it’s lowest levels in the past 25 years.   Here are probably a few facts you don’t know:

– Projected 2013 birthrate in the U.S. is estimated to be 1.86

– Birthrate needed to maintain a population over a 20 year period is 2.1

Why should this concern you?

There are a number of reasons one might be concerned that you need as many young people as old for the simple fact of having enough young people to take care of your older population.  If you turn that equation upside down (Taiwan 1.1 or Portugal 1.3) you have a society full of older people and not enough young people to fill the jobs needed to keep running your society.

The U.S. already has 3 Million jobs left unfilled because of lack of skilled employees today. Imagine if you now have millions of fewer workers to even choose from, and by the way, skilled workers aren’t coming from other countries because their societies are growing and need them as well.  That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment – but this will be

That is what our country’s employment picture will look like in 2032.  I know for many people right now this sounds very good – because of our high unemployment but this will be an HR/Recruiting nightmare for those young HR/Talent Pros starting out their careers in the next 20 years.

Being the Futurist that I am, I’ve already provided a solution to this problem back in 2011 over at Fistful of Talent, Should You Encourage Your Employees To Have Babies, check it out. Basically, my advice remains the same as U.S. employers we need to create a positive, encouraging environment for our employees, with family-friendly policies that make our employees feel like starting a family is a good thing, and that if they do start a family their job and ability to get a promotion won’t be compromised.  This is not the case as many U.S. employers right now for both men and women in the workforce.

As HR Pros and organizations we tend to think this isn’t our issue.  It will take care of itself.  But as we look at countries with low birthrates the issue doesn’t take care of itself and those countries have a worker crisis going on right now.    We need to change our ways right now. We need to be family friendly employers. We need to, as HR Pros, be concerned and find solutions for our employees around daycare, flexible schedules and other practices that will help our employees with families.   I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the hardest

I know it sounds a bit the-sky-is-falling-ish, but the numbers don’t lie we are headed for some of the toughest hiring this country has ever seen.

One solution I’ve thought of, that I didn’t bring up in 2011, is baby sign-on bonuses!  We already do it for college students! I think we start doing for babies of our best employees.  I mean if parents can arrange their kid’s marriage, what stops us from arranging their first job?  Nothing! That’s what.  Imagine how happy your employees would be to cash a $20,000 check to help with baby expenses for the simple task of forcing their kid to come to work with your company upon college graduation.  It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

It seems so simple, I’m not quite sure why no one has started this yet!

What if it’s impossible to fix the Gender Wage Gap?

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I love the HR and Talent data analytics platform Visier and have been following them for years. Recently, Visier released a study called the Visier Insight’s Report: Gender Equity that I found fascinating!

Basically, Visier claims they discovered the main reason behind the gender pay gap and they titled it the “Manager Divide” (You can download the report here). The Manager Divide—an underrepresentation of women in manager positions—significantly contributes to the gender wage gap. To break it down simply, women begin to leave the workforce around age 26 to begin having babies. At this point, the wage gap begins and women never catch up!

Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 2.33.25 PMYou can clearly see it in this graph from the Visier report. Men and women virtually earn the same up until age 26, in fact, women earn slightly more. At age 26 there is a huge split in the graph, and women don’t even start to close that gap until close to retirement.

Visier gives a bunch of great ways for organizations to close the gap:

– Implement the “Rooney Rule”: for every manager position you have open to fill, consider “at least one woman and one underrepresented minority” in your slate of candidates.

– Implement blind screening, removing names (or other gender identifiers) from resumes when selecting candidates for interviews.

– Increase measurement and awareness of gender equity in the rollout or implementation of HR policies, including manager promotions and hires, and compensation policies.

– Support meaningful paid parental leave that is equal for both women and men.

– Ensure it is socially acceptable for both men and women to take time off to care for their children.

All good stuff, right?

Here’s my question: if this gender wage gap phenomenon happens because of a natural cause (childbirth and rearing), how does any of this change it?

It doesn’t. The majority of women are till going to leave the workforce, on average between 26 and 36, to begin raising their family. Whether these women leave for 9 months or 9 years, they’ll return to the workforce with that much less of experience.  So, they’ll always be playing catch up, for the most part, to those men who didn’t leave to have babies and raise them.

The reality is, because of women leaving to have babies and raise families, they’ll always be a pay disparity between genders. Should it be 21% on average? No. That’s why we need to focus on the real issue at hand.

In most organizations of any size, you have females making less than men who are in the same position with basically the same experience, performance, and education level. The only reason they are making less is because they’re a female. That’s the real issue.

How do you fix this?

The old fashion way. It’s a big project. You’ll have big spreadsheets and you’ll have uncomfortable conversations with managers who gave larger raises to men, for no reason other than their bias. It’s an uncomfortable project, but it’s the only way to solve the real issue. Painstakingly one position, one department, one person at a time.

You can do high-level analysis in your organization and you’ll find a gender pay gap. That’s natural, the Visier report pointed this out. It’s going to continue to happen because we live in a society and culture where women still do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to childbirth and raising the children. You have to get into the weeds to find the real issues within your organization in terms of gender pay gap, not a 20,000-foot flyover.

Every large organization I’ve ever worked in had gender pay issues within specific positions and departments. It wasn’t rampant, but it was there. A word of caution, don’t point fingers at fault. Just work to solve the problem. It happened, how do we move forward and fix it. Placing blame will cause stalls and fights, you don’t want to be a part of at an executive level. Just find ways to quietly fix the problem and make things right.

 

In Recruiting, Content Is NOT King!

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Something happened over the past five years. Content marketing, which is a brilliant way to connect with a customer base and build sales, became very fashionable in the recruiting space.  So much so, that I constantly read vendors telling in the trenches Talent Acquisition pros and leaders:

“In Recruiting, content is king!”

No. No, it is not! In recruiting, activity is king.  I think the confusion comes into play with people treating employment branding and recruiting as the same thing. They’re not the same thing. One build’s awareness of who you are and what kind of employer you might be, possibly you can stretch employment branding into awareness of your job openings as well.

Content in employment branding is important if you’re doing content recruitment marketing. Again, you don’t have to do this to do employment branding. Many organizations build their brand without content. If you have a great consumer brand, you are less likely to need content to build your employment brand.

I’m not against producing great content to build your brand, believe me! It can be super helpful, especially if you don’t have a larger consumer brand behind you.

The point is you can be awesome in recruiting and never produce a single piece of content. I see so many TA shops missing this right now. The question is why? Why are TA shops believing that the only way to recruit is to build content and build an audience?

Employer Branding is a huge business right now! Organizations are spending millions of dollars per year to build, maintain and grow their employment brand. For huge organizations, or organizations in highly competitive environments, this is very important. For many organizations, this is a complete waste of time and resources!

The noise in the employment branding space is so loud right now, most organizations are not going to be heard. In that case, why are you spending the resources? You’re doing this because it’s easier than picking up a phone and calling a candidate! That’s recruiting.

Recruiting are the activities you do to hire people for the jobs you have open. Included in those activities are not only candidate attraction but candidate interaction. Candidate interaction, the function of a recruiter interacting with a candidate, might be the most forgotten skill in all of Talent Acquisition.

The skill of interacting with a live person is lost on most talent acquisition shops. Sure you can connect with candidates via email, messaging, text, twitter, Snapchat, etc. Eventually, though, someone has to speak to a live person. Someone has to close this person on coming to work for you. We, the talent acquisition industry, continue to spend less and less time on this side of our business, and it’s showing.

Great recruiting organizations are activity focused and activity driven. Sales funnel. Candidates come in the top, and hires come out the bottom. It’s not difficult. It’s not art. It’s a process. It’s metrics. Teach your recruiters to be able to engage live people on the front side, and you will see a great return on that investment in more hires. No content needed.

 

 

5 Things You Should Be Doing in June to Prepare for Your Open Enrollment in the Fall

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It’s a beautiful day here in Michigan! 75 degrees and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. In the north, we get only a limited time to enjoy summer, so when it finally arrives you better believe I’m taking full advantage! (For, me that’s tending to my flowers and doing some yard work.)

What’s my point? The last thing you probably want to be doing right now is brainstorming ways to prep for open enrollment!  But guess what—you don’t have to…Because, while I’m still here in the office, I’m going to do it for you, so you (and I) can spend a little more time enjoying this great summer weather!

Here then is my list of Important OE Stuff You Should Be Doing Right Now:

  1. Schedule employee roundtable meetings to get the feedback you need on the last benefit design. Make it fun. Provide an ice cream sundae station! It will work twofold: you’ll get the feedback you need to start your next design, and people love ice cream! You connect talking about benefits with having a positive experience. Simple psychology is the best psychology!
  2. Do a mid-year follow-up with your benefits broker.They should already be on top of this and begging you to go out to lunch, or golfing, but if they haven’t, remind them. Specifically, this is a great time to look at your brand-name drug utilization and talk about some strategies to increase generic use and reduce this cost to the organization.
  3. Executive cost foreshadowing should be happening right now.At this point in the year, your broker can have a pretty good guess at where your new premiums are going to come in at, and what this might mean to your new benefits design. Schedule a meeting with the C-Suite to give them some insight now, so they’re prepared when budgeting season comes. The best way not to ‘shock’ an executive is to get to them early in the process.
  4. Deliver your own Summer Tips and Tricks communication to your employees on proper benefit utilization!Summer seems to be the time when people find their way to the emergency room when maybe the could have gone to urgent care. These are also a great time to highlight wellness initiatives since we are all trying to get into those swimsuits before vacation! Simple reminders like these save the organization money and keep your most important messages top of mind to your employees.
  5. Schedule an OE marketing session before all the summer vacations start.As benefit pros we spend a lot of time and care figuring out what to say to our employees. What we tend to figure out too last minute is HOW we want to market these changes to our employees. Summer is a great time to not only think about the how—but to play around with some new ideas. What if you texted employees tips about OE on top of emailing them? What if you decided to send postcards to everyone’s homes? Now’s the time to figure out what you want to try—and establish a schedule for getting it done in time.

(Speaking of schedules, if you want even more ideas on what to be doing in June and July for OE, check out this excellent post—What to Do 12-16 Weeks Before OE, by the folks at Jellyvision.)

Anyway,  I really do believe you can never be too prepared for Open Enrollment. A little extra effort now will lead to a great experience for you and your team come fall—and let you have more fun this summer, knowing you’re ahead of the game.

 

 

SHRM Gems! #SHRM16

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SHRM’s National Conference just finished up this week. I couldn’t attend in person, but through the ‘magic’ of social media and a bunch of friends who did attend, I was able to keep up on much of the action. I saw so many great pieces coming out on Twitter, Facebook, and Facebook Live (Sorry, SHRM, some folks lived streamed some stuff!).

My friend Laurie Ruettimann also wrote a great piece on remembering many of the past SHRM National conferences she attended, check out that post it was great. With that in mind I wanted to share with you SHRM Gems I’ve gathered over the years, but instead of telling which year I got them from, I want you to guess! It’ll be fun, play along:

SHRM Gems!

1. Receiving feedback is a leadership skill that needs to be developed. Year ________

2. People get hired because of their ‘hard skills’, but fired because of their ‘soft skills’.  Year ______

3. Create a culture that makes it okay to make mistakes. Year ______

4. Change is inevitable, growth is optional.  Year _____

5. Hiring managers spend only 6 seconds looking at a resume before deciding if it’s worth consideration. Year ______

6. HR must be able to adapt. Year _____

7. I see humans as humans, not as resources. Year _____

8. Become a solutions machine. Year _____

9. Headcount is meaningless, focus on how you can get work done. Year _____

10. Feedback shouldn’t come as a surprise. Year _____

11. Good leaders focus on connecting people and building relationships. Year _____

Okay, so what do you think?  Tough right!?

It seems like many of these we’ve been talking about for the past decade or more!

Drum roll, please!  All of these quotes were taken from speakers at this year’s SHRM conference! 2016, oh, we’ve come a long way, baby…

When I first started seeing these I got a bit depressed. I was like, “Come on! We’re better than this! We’re HR Pros!” Then, I actually said this in my head, “We need to elevate the conversation!”

You want to know when the first time I heard, “we need to elevate the conversation!”  It was at an SHRM National conference, about eight years ago.

That’s when it hit me.  SHRM National is good because it allows HR pros from around the world, at all levels, to come and get what they need, at whatever level they’re at.  All 11 items above I’ve heard at past SHRM conferences, but thousands of up-and-coming HR pros heard it for the first time this week in D.C. That’s awesome!

Just like I needed to hear that stuff at one point in my career, and still need to be reminded about much it still today, SHRM is about developing yourself at whichever level you are at currently.

I used to get frustrated when I went to SHRM and saw presenters bring back the exact same presentation that I saw them do the year before! I thought that was amateur hour. I’m the amateur. Great content, in HR, probably has at least a five-year life span, if not more. If you can nail a great presentation, with a great message, it will have legs!

I’ll be back in New Orleans next year if SHRM will have me. I missed it this year. I missed being surrounded by an engaged community of great HR pros. I missed being reminded of the vastness of this community. I missed the great reminders of what we all should be striving to accomplish each day.

@AnythingOverIce Takes Over The Project at #SHRM16

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I couldn’t be at SHRM National this year so I sent my roving reporter, HR Pro, and friend, Chris Bailey! BTW – He’s also the Director of PwC’s HR Practice in the Caribbean. Chris will be giving you daily updates from D.C. and filling you in on all things #SHRM16! (P.S. – We could name this series “Selfies of Chris Around D.C.!) P.S. You can tell this isn’t me – I never write 1200+ words! Thanks to Chris for the SHRM updates! Make sure you connect with Chris on Twitter and on LinkedIn! 

Dear Tim Sackett and his many readers,

As my last ramble was filled with spelling errors I must apologize.  As mentioned it was mainly written on the go on my iPhone! I should also point out that I was a “train”- wreck yesterday as subsequent videos on my Facebook feed will attest to. You see the heavens opened which could only mean that I was destined to spend some time at the bar as it was far too wet to venture outside late in the day. It did, however, mean that I attended some of the later sessions which can often be the graveyard session for speakers as most people are off getting ready for the big night out! Now at this point I need to ask for some feedback from the HR community – Have we forgotten how to party? I mean, really, going home at 9:30pm after a kick ass concert from Train just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do. I know the majority of us are mid 30’s onwards and have kids but isn’t the point of a conference to come get away from it all learn some stuff then party like your graduating college? I have a theory on this and you’re not going to like it!

HR people are not healthy! Yet we are the people promoting the wellness campaigns in our organizations, if you we’re tired after walking around the expo followed by getting on an escalator and sitting down for an hour in a session then you need to take a good look at yourself.  Seriously, people were having to rest just from moving from one session to another, it’s no more than about 1000 meters which is a 10-minute walk from the furthest session to the next – I know because I measured it on my Garmin. So if a 10-minute walk tires you out to the point where you enter the next session sweating and slumping down into the chair with an audible sigh then you need to outsource your wellness program cuz people are not going to buy what your selling!  I weigh 260lbs – I ran every morning around the Washington monuments, (About 10km) I took the stairs not the escalators during the conference and frequently walked the 3km back to my hotel. I did this as I wanted to see the city, stay in shape and work up to the dinner and beer I had in the evening. It really made me wonder whether wellness in the workplace is just a thing that we talk about rather than a thing that we should practice.  

Two of my colleagues from Cayman also wanted to get a little exercise and see the city.  So, at lunchtime rather than running for the box lunches (which are proper rubbish btw) we grabbed those capital bikes and we cycled the monuments of Washington. They had a blast and we had a healthy lunch stop mid-way. Quick shower and change then back for afternoon sessions. Now when they posted those picture back to their teams at work they were happy smiling and being active way more engaging for their own wellness programs. So I am going to throw it down for New Orleans #SHRM17 I will do a daily bike or running tour for any HR pros who believe as I do that we have to be the ambassadors for what we do and if corporate wellness is a part of that then so must we be. So my theory was that due to the lack of activity amongst our HR Pros they were all knackered by 9:30pm and went to bed… leaving Washington to me….(enter evil laugh here). Ok wellness rant over, sessions – as mentioned I attended a 4pm session, but first caught very well-polished –

Brad Karsh presenting, How to Be Present When You’re Not.

I was interested in seeing what he would talk about for an hour on this and much to my amusement the first 15 minutes I spent going OMG really 1000 people in this room don’t know this stuff! However he had to start somewhere and he was very funny in his delivery but a couple of key points which reminded me that I should do these during Webex or webinar on phone conferences etc…

·        Start with a bang

·        Tell them what is coming up

·        Keep it simple

·        Don’t send them slides in advance

·        Refer to their names often (makes them pay attention in case they get asked something)

·        Every 10 minutes do something that engages the group

55% of what someone takes in from you come from body language, 38% of that same engagement comes from tone, and only 7% is your actual words! Which means if you’re not present you have to engage through tone and visuals cues to have your message heard. Now this is Brad’s take on it and I would love to know how we measure those percentages but I am not going to argue with them as I happen to think they are true. So some interesting this to consider from a session that I didn’t think would hold much relevance.

Lizbeth Clause (@global_I_press) Trends in Global HR Practice – Avoiding the Disruption.

Now, the last session of the day had a title with some promise, so I wondered what she saw as disruption and how she was promoting we combat it. To say I was blown away was an understatement. She should have had a mega session not the smattering of die-hard HR folk still actively participating at 4pm on the evening of a Train concert!  She got off to a slow start but after she explained what she believed trends where and how HR analytics play a big part in identifying them she started giving some real world examples of how her data had avoided massive disruption. That’s the part that hit home for me because the academic principles that she employed to gather and extract data plus employ a hypothesis which subsequently delivered a solution became real and it’s something I will absolutely use going forward.

Stay with me here! Example when the Ebola scare was hitting US hospitals. They used string data mining to formulate hotspots amongst nurses which showed they were really concerned about providing treatment. Nurses would use company email to voice their concerns to colleagues which when triggered in the algorithm created a hotspot of worry that HR was able to respond to and avoid industrial action. They used data analytics to get ahead of the problem.  

I could go on and give the several examples she did but I’ll simply leave you with some of her key takeaways:

·        Make HR Decision based on Analytics

·        Change the Organization culture to include Evidence-based decision making and HR Management

·        Balance the use of ambient corporate data with privacy

·        Move HR to the cloud

·        Use HR apps

I did a little  video interview with her afterward as I wanted to continue the discussion. As an academic, she is brilliant, and passionate and I wish other speakers who waffled out the same old crap would take note. HR analytics + Passion + solving real time and real world issues with simple use = Awesome so glad I went to this!

So then I went to see train perform and the night became a blur…… Thank SHRM and goodnight!

Drops mic walks off……